4. THE ANTI-SEMITE IN THE CLASS REVEALED

When I came home last night I took the mannequin head out of my carrying case and left it out overnight so that the hair could dry and not end up smelling like a wet dog (these mannequins have real human hair-more on this later ). I put it in back of my couch on my ironing board, which usually takes me a week to put back in it's place. Every time I went out of the room and came back in I screamed when I saw the head. I kept forgetting it was there and then spazzing out when I saw it. You would have thought that after awhile I would "get it" and remember that it was there, but no such luck. I kept spazzing. Then I found my cat Ethan attacking the head, his full body on top of the head, biting away like he was biting on a large hairy animal, and knew it was time to put it back in the case.

Today we met Mr. Sanchez. I wondered why this guy got to use his last name to be addressed and started to expound (to myself) on how unfair it was that the female instructors had to use THEIR first names, only to find out that Sanchez IS his first name!

Mr. Sanchez is this tall, very built, over 6'2" African-American man. I watch people, and would see him on my breaks looking very serious and not speaking much at all. That big, silent, brooding type. Mr. Sanchez turned out to be a riot. Once inside the classroom, quiet spoken though he is, he is funny. And he makes you stay on the ball. He is one of those teachers that calls out your name to answer a question from your previous night's homework (yes, it was still an average of 25 pages plus workbook) so you had no choice but to sit up and take notice.

The one thing that amazes me (here goes my snotty New Yorker thing again) is that no one can pronounce the latin/biological terminology! Not even the teachers! I realize you don't say to a client, "Well Ms. Smith, you have a serious case of fragilitis crinium" (split ends), but you would think that the teachers at least would have practiced pronouncing these words! It made me a bit crazy (er).

We received our male mannequin heads today (the one that was missing from our initial kit). When we took it out of its box, 5 students exclaimed that it looked like Jesus. One student exclaimed that it looked like someone she dated in high school. The only one that got it was the teacher.

There is this girl, and yes I mean girl, since she's about 18, in the class named Stephanie, that has this habit of speaking as though her words build up in her mouth and they explode outwards when she speaks, followed by a sucking in, through her mouth, of her saliva. And she's loud. And she's an 18 year old know it all (aren't all 18 year olds?). She washes hair for a living in a salon.

Well Mr. Sanchez is now, at the end of class, talking shop, telling us about how people tip, not to prejudge that you're going to receive a wopper of a gratuity cause you'll always end up disappointed, etc. Spit sucking Stephanie then blurts out how the Jewish ladies whose hair she washes are so cheap, and before she can finish her anti-semetic thrashing, I spurt out that I resent what she just said. I was in the company of others. I did it tactfully. Which is not usually how I handle things that really piss me off.

So now Stephanie looks like a deer caught in the headlights, Mr. Sanchez is looking at her like she's an idiot, and the 2 African-American students in the class look down at the floor, probably thinking that if this bitch thinks this way about Jews, they can only imagine what she thinks about them.

So Stephanie says she didn't mean to be insulting, and I tell her she was and she shuts up, sucking in her spit yet again.